.

But what right, it may be asked, has Great Britain to this naval supremacy?
Why should we, more than any other Power, claim one of the elements for our
own? Has not Germany some reason to be jealous? Why should we not allow
her, together with ourselves, "a place on the Ocean"?

The answer to this lies in the character of the British Empire. One quarter
of the human race live under the Union Jack, scattered throughout the
oceans and controlled from a small island in the Western seas. For Great
Britain, alone among the States of the world, naval supremacy, and nothing
less, is a daily and hourly necessity. India realised this truth recently
in a flash when, after generations of silent protection by British
sea-power, German shells fell one night at Madras. Any Power that
challenges the naval supremacy of Great Britain is quarrelling, not with
the British Government or the British people, but with the facts of
history, of geography, and of the political evolution of the world. The
British Empire has not been built up, like the German, by the work of
statesmen and thinkers; it is not the result, as Germans think, of
far-seeing national policy or persistent ambition and "greed." It has
slowly taken shape, during the last four centuries, since intercourse was
opened up by sea between the different races of mankind, in accordance with
the needs of the world as a whole. Its collapse, at the hands of Germany or
any other Power, would not mean the substitution of a non-British Empire
for a British. It would inaugurate a period of chaos in all five continents
of the world.

The rulers and people of Germany, who counted on the "decadence" of Great
Britain and the disintegration of her unorganised Empire, did not realise
these simple facts. Their lack of perception was due partly to their
political inexperience; but a deeper reason for it lies in their wholly
false estimate as to what "world-policy" and "world-empire" mean. Trained
in the Prussian school, they thought of them, like soldiers, in terms of
conquest, glory, and prestige. That way lies Napoleonism. None of the great
Powers is wholly free from blame on this score. But until Germans realise,
as the other Powers are slowly realising, that the true basis of Empire is
not a love of glory but a sense of responsibility towards backward peoples,
it will be hard to readmit them into the comity of the Great Powers. Only
a sense of common purposes and ideals, and of joint respo